Andrew MalcolmPolitical News & Commentary

Hi, everybody.
This week, there was a big birthday you might have missed. Medicare and
Medicaid turned 50 years old. And that’s something worth celebrating.

If
one of the best measures of a country is how it treats its more
vulnerable citizens — seniors, the poor, the sick — then America has a
lot to be proud of. Think about it. Before Social Security, too many
seniors lived in poverty. Before Medicare, only half had some form of
health insurance. Before Medicaid, parents often had no help covering
the cost of care for a child with a disability.

But as Americans,
we declared that our citizens deserve a basic measure of security and
dignity. And today, the poverty rate for seniors is less than half of
what it was fifty years ago. Every American over 65 has access to
affordable health care. And today, we’re finally finishing the job —
since I signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the uninsured rate for
all Americans has fallen by about one-third.

These promises we
made as a nation have saved millions of our own people from poverty and
hardship, allowing us new freedom, new independence, and the chance to
live longer, better lives. That’s something to be proud of. It’s heroic.
These endeavors — these American endeavors — they didn’t just make us a
better country. They reaffirmed that we are a great country.

And a
great country keeps the promises it makes. Today, we’re often told that
Medicare and Medicaid are in crisis. But that’s usually a political
excuse to cut their funding, privatize them, or phase them out entirely —
all of which would undermine their core guarantee. The truth is, these
programs aren’t in crisis. Nor have they kept us from cutting our
deficits by two-thirds since I took office.

What is true is that every
month, another 250,000 Americans turn 65 years old, and become eligible
for Medicare. And we all deserve a health care system that delivers
efficient, high-quality care. So to keep these programs strong, we’ll
have to make smart changes over time, just like we always have.

Today,
we’re actually proving that’s possible. The Affordable Care Act has
already helped secure Medicare’s funding for another 13 years. The
Affordable Care Act has saved more than nine million folks on Medicare
$15 billion on their prescription medicine. It has expanded Medicaid to
help cover 12.8 million more Americans, and to help more seniors live
independently. And we’re moving our health care system toward models
that reward the quality of the care you receive, not the quantity of
care you receive. That means healthier Americans and a healthier federal
budget.

Today, these programs are so fundamental to our way of
life that it’s easy to forget how hard people fought against them at the
time. When FDR created Social Security, critics called it socialism.
When JFK and LBJ worked to create Medicare, the cynics said it would
take away our freedom. But ultimately, we came to see these programs for
what they truly are — a promise that if we work hard, and play by the
rules, we’ll be rewarded with a basic measure of dignity, security, and
the freedom to live our lives as we want.

It’s a promise that
previous generations made to us, and a promise that our generation has
to keep. Thanks, and have a great weekend. ####

Today
I’d like to share with you some good news about the progress that
Congress is making for every American. From the start, our focus has
been your priorities. So instead of top-down bureaucrats picking
winners and losers, our goal is an opportunity economy built on
good-paying jobs and the freedom to innovate.

And instead of the
same-old outdated models in Washington, DC, we’re working on solutions
that empower you to achieve a better life. (Scroll down to watch video of these remarks.)

Already, we enacted the first real entitlement reform in nearly two decades.
Now, seniors will have the peace of mind to count on Medicare and
taxpayers will save $2.9 trillion over the long term. We passed the
first 10-year House-Senate balanced budget plan since 2001. (The Spanish version of these remarks is available here.)

We
enacted new tools to fight the evil of human trafficking; new resources
to improve care for our veterans; and a plan to advance American trade
and promote American jobs. We ended the bulk collection of phone data,
and ensured that Congress will have a say on the bad nuclear deal with
Iran. And that’s just in the last seven months.

Since 2010, when you first elected a Republican majority in the House:

We cut spending by more than $2.1 trillion — the most significant spending reductions in modern history.

We protected 99 percent of Americans from permanent tax increases.

We
achieved job skills reform, student loan reform, VA reform and
Medicare reform. We stopped the transfer of terrorist detainees into the
United States. We enacted the most significant measure to help
Americans with disabilities in 25 years.

And we passed the most sweeping pro-life legislation in history.

Of course, we have much more to do.

Dozens of effective solutions to deliver you real results are in the works.
For example, the 21st Century Cures Act would accelerate the discovery,
development and delivery of life-saving innovations.

The Student
Success Act would take power away from the federal government so every
child can have an equal opportunity to get a great education. And we’re
ready to modernize the VA system with new technologies to honor our
heroes with world-class care to match their world-class service.

Here’s
the bottom line: we are just getting started on solving problems to
empower you have the opportunity to pursue your own future and reach
your full potential. Thank you for listening, and have a great weekend.
####

Our 190,000 combined followers on Twitter (click here for that) and on Facebook (then click here to subscribe to that) know that on weekday afternoons we regularly share a selection of that
evening's late-night jokes before broadcast. We publish a collection of
these and other jokes when the shows are not on hiatus.

Conan:
Darth Vader was in front of me at Starbucks this morning. In typical
Starbucks fashion, the barista wrote “Garth Bader” on the cup.

Fallon: Tom Cruise is here to promote the new "Mission: Impossible" movie, which is all about Donald Trump's PR team.

Conan:
Big show tonight. We have the cast of “Game of Thrones.” I just went to
say hi to them in the Green Room and they’re all dead.

Meyers:
The French language Scrabble championship was won this week by a New
Zealand man who does not speak French. Of course, in French scrabble,
you win by flipping over the board and going outside for a cigarette.

Meyers:
The U.S. won the International Math Olympiad. So if you don’t think
Americans can compete with Asia in math, maybe you should talk to some
of the members of the American team, like Shyam Narayanan, Yang Liu and
Allen Liu and their coach Po-Shen Loh.

Meyers: A student at the
University of Alabama was arrested for having 10,000 Xanax pills stashed
in his home. Not surprisingly, he’s taking the arrest really, really
well.

Fallon: Some tech news. Google is adding a new feature that
will allow customers to shop directly through its most popular search
results. In which case, congratulations to the makers of “boobs.”

Conan:
In an interview, Donald Trump said that he does not know why he agreed
to fly to New York to meet Ted Cruz. Then he promised to bring that kind
of leadership to the Oval Office.

Conan: There’s now footage of
the drug kingpin “El Chapo” changing his shoes right before his prison
escape. Apparently, authorities didn’t notice El Chapo was lacing up a
pair of “Nike Tunnel Runners.”

Meyers: July 15th was a rare day
when no professional sporting events took place in the U.S. Causing
millions of fathers everywhere to ask their daughters, “Why can’t your
dance recital be today?”

Conan: The Trump International Golf
Course in Puerto Rico has filed for bankruptcy. This may be because of
Trump’s rule, “No Puerto Ricans on my Puerto Rican golf course.”

Conan: The Obama Administration announced a deal with Iran that............Continue Reading »

Hi, everybody.
It’s been seven years since the worst financial crisis in generations
spread from Wall Street to Main Street — a crisis that cost millions of
Americans their jobs, their homes, their life savings. It was a crisis
that cost all of us. It was a reminder that we’re in this together — all
of us.

That’s how we’ve battled back these past six and a half
years — together. We still have work to do, but together, we prevented a
second Great Depression. Our businesses have created nearly 13 million
jobs over the past 64 months. The housing market is healthier. The stock
market has more than doubled, restoring the retirement savings of
millions. Americans of all stripes buckled down, rolled up their
sleeves, and worked to bring this country back. And to protect your
efforts, we had to do something more — we had to make sure this kind of
crisis never happens again.

That’s why five years ago this week,
we enacted the toughest Wall Street reform in history — new rules of the
road to protect businesses, consumers, and our entire economy from the
kind of irresponsibility that threatened all of us. Five years later,
here’s what that reform has done.

Wall Street Reform turned the
page on the era of “too big to fail.” Now, in America, we welcome the
pursuit of profit. But if your business fails, we shouldn’t have to bail
you out. And under the new rules, we won’t — the days of
taxpayer-funded bailouts are over.

Wall Street Reform now allows
us to crack down on some of the worst types of recklessness that brought
our economy to its knees, from big banks making huge, risky bets using
borrowed money, to paying executives in a way that rewarded
irresponsible behavior.

Thanks to Wall Street Reform, there’s
finally an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with one
mission: to protect American consumers. Already, they’ve gone after
predatory or unscrupulous mortgage brokers, student lenders, credit card
companies, and they’ve won —putting nearly $11 billion back in the
pockets of more than 26 million consumers who’ve been cheated.

So this law is working. And we’re working to protect even more families. Just this week, we announced............Continue Reading »

Hi,
I’m Senator Jim Inhofe and I have the honor of serving as the Chairman
of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Passing a
long-term transportation reauthorization bill has been my top priority
since returning as chairman of that committee.

It is one of the
most important issues Congress will deal with this entire year, and why
Senator Barbara Boxer and I made it the topic of our first full
committee meeting hearing in the 114th Congress.

You see, there is
no such thing as a Republican road or a Democrat road — this issue
always transcends the political fights in Washington. Why? Because
funding our nation’s transportation system is our constitutional
responsibility. The Framers of the Constitution recognized
transportation’s importance by explicitly vesting Congress with the
responsibility to establish Post Roads and to regulate interstate
commerce. (Scroll down for video of these remarks.)

Now,
thanks to the vision of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the famous
general, the National Highway System was created and continues to serve
as the backbone to a strong national defense and economy through the
movement of goods and services. This legacy system was built with a
50-year design life, now more than 60 old — and is well beyond its
warranty.

Maintaining Eisenhower’s vision of economic opportunity
and strength in defense requires a continued partnership between the
federal government and the states — this is the hallmark of the DRIVE
Act that the Senate is considering this week.

Senator Barbara
Boxer is a proud liberal and I’m a proud conservative, and we came
together and agreed to author the DRIVE Act. We worked for several
months to ensure this would be a strong, bipartisan bill, and it passed
out of our committee unanimously on June 24th.

While the mainstream media focus on major political stories such as
what Donald Trump said about what an aide said, the other candidates in
the Republican primary race are quietly going about the important
business of drafting and giving speeches on their evolving policies.

Today, in advance of next week's first GOP debate, we take a look at Gov. Rick Perry's address on economic policy given Wednesday in New York City. (Scroll down for the full text.)

The
65-year-old Perry comes to the economics discussion with considerable
credibility. As the longest-serving governor in Texas history, he's
presided over a vast state of 25.1 million residents where 1.5 million new jobs were created in recent
years. Thanks in large part to tax cuts, regulation reduction and
extensive tort reforms curtailing frivolous lawsuits.

Here are some key excerpts from his full remarks below:

"For
a century or more, Wall Street has been famous for one thing: its role
as the financial engine of the world’s economy. It has funded
entrepreneurs, homeowners and the world’s great innovators. However,
Wall Street’s reputation isn’t what it once was. After the bailouts of
2008, Americans came to believe that Wall Street is out for itself. That
the game is rigged."

"Most Americans see a special political
class that spends large sums of money to wield influence, to protect
entrenched interests, to advocate for special favors at the expense of
taxpayers and the general public.

"This kind of cronyism has transformed capitalism into
corporatism, where profit is secured without risk. Where government
officials reward cronies in pet industries, forcing taxpayers to pick up
the tab for companies like Solyndra, or quasi-public entities like
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

"But I am tired of politicians bashing Wall Street while ignoring the sins of Washington, D.C. It
was Washington regulators who fell asleep at the switch. It was
Washington politicians who changed laws that created the housing crisis. The
roots of the financial crisis can be traced to the 1990s. President
Clinton’s goal was to add another 8 million people to the ranks of
homeowners."

"We have to level the playing field between small
banks and big ones. Second, we have to put forward smart regulations
that make it less
likely that the banks of the future will fail. I don’t always
agree with the Federal Reserve, but last week they announced the final
version of a new rule that points us in a promising new direction.

Hello,
I’m Jeb Hensarling, Congressman for the Fifth District of Texas and
Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Five years ago this
week President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Act. You may not
have heard of Dodd-Frank, but it’s essentially ObamaCare for our economy
and your household finances.

And just like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank has left us with fewer choices, higher costs and less freedom.

Now,
the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed devastated
millions of Americans. But instead of preventing the crisis, misguided
Washington policies helped lead us into it — policies that either
strong-armed or enticed financial institutions into loaning money to
people to buy homes they couldn’t afford to keep.

That was wrong.

It wasn’t deregulation that caused the crisis. It was Washington’s dumb regulations.

Then,
and now, House Republicans have offered an alternative to Dodd-Frank
that would have ended taxpayer-funded bailouts and protected consumers.
But in typical Washington fashion, Democrats instead passed a 2,300-page
bill that did not solve the crisis but in many ways made it worse.

When
President Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law five years ago with much
fanfare and celebration, we were told it would ‘lift the economy,’ ‘end
too big to fail’ and ‘increase financial stability.’ It didn’t happen.

But,
Dodd-Frank did nothing to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were
at the epicenter of the crisis. It enshrined taxpayer-funded bailouts
and ‘too big to fail’ into law, and it imposed 400 new burdensome,
job-destroying regulations upon our economy.

And the harm to consumers has been real, very real. We continue to be mired in lackluster, halting economic growth.

Middle
income paychecks are nearly $12,000 compared to the average post-war
economic recovery. It is now harder for credit-worthy Americans to buy a
home. In fact, one-out-of-five who borrowed to buy a home just five
years ago will not meet the underwriting requirements of Dodd-Frank’s
mortgage rules. According to the Federal Reserve, that’ll hit roughly
one-third of Hispanic and African-American borrowers.

Since Dodd-Frank, the big banks have gotten bigger and the small banks are now fewer. Today there are fewer............Continue Reading »

This
week, the United States and our international partners finally achieved
something that decades of animosity has not — a deal that will prevent
Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

This deal will make America
and the world safer and more secure. Still, you’re going to hear a lot
of overheated and often dishonest arguments about it in the weeks ahead.
So today, I want to take a moment to take those on one by one, and
explain what this deal does and what it means.

First, you’ll hear
some critics argue that this deal somehow makes it easier for Iran to
obtain a nuclear weapon. Now, if you think it sounds strange that the
United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and some
of the world’s best nuclear scientists would agree to something like
that, you’re right. This deal actually closes off Iran’s pathway to a
nuclear weapon. Today, Iran has enough nuclear material to produce up to
10 nuclear weapons.

With this deal, they’ll have to ship 98% of
that material out of the country — leaving them with a fraction of what
it takes to make even one weapon.

With this deal, they’ll have to
repurpose two key nuclear facilities so they can’t produce materials
that could be used for a nuclear weapon. So this deal actually pushes
Iran further away from a bomb. And there’s a permanent prohibition on
Iran ever having a nuclear weapon.

Second, you might hear from
critics that Iran could just ignore what’s required and do whatever they
want. That they’re inevitably going to cheat. Well, that’s wrong, too.

With
this deal, we will have unprecedented, 24/7 monitoring of Iran’s key
nuclear facilities. With this deal, international inspectors will have
access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain. The verification process
set up by this deal is comprehensive and it is intrusive — precisely so
we can make sure Iran keeps its commitments.

From time to time as the 2016 campaign unfolds we will publish here
the full text of some candidate speeches on important topics. We launch
this series with Carly Fiorina's national security address at the Reagan
Presidential Library the evening of July 27.

The full text is
below, as is a complete video, and we will pull out some of the more distinctive passages in a
moment. You'll notice here -- and hopefully in the upcoming debates --
that the business executive speaks in clear, simple declarative
sentences. No fudge words or rhetorical escape clauses. Clean, crisp, no
nonsense.

She outlines the problem, then states clearly what she
would do. That style drew frequent applause from the audience at the
Reagan Library, scene of a nationally-televised Republican debate with all the candidates in mid-September.

Fiorina's
speech reads well, but is even better when heard, given her sharp,
sometimes tart delivery. (Scroll down for complete video of her remarks
and the ensuing Q and A's.) It's a refreshing change and not accidental
as even Fiorina's words and speaking manner set her apart from from the
usual Washington blather uttered by what she calls "the professional
political class." You know who you are, sitting senators.

She
smoothly weaves in biographical details when relevant to the content;
She has known adversity, having battled breast cancer and lost a
daughter to what she calls "the demons of addiction."

And
Fiornia's style also, not accidentally, turns the absence of an elected
office on her resume into a plus as a fresh outsider unencumbered by the
convoluted and ineffective ways that so many Americans see enacted in
Congress, which is rewarded by historically low poll approval.. But
Fiorina knows her stuff, deftly handling even unscreened questions after
her Reagan remarks and in numerous other appearances.

At least
one wealthy GOP candidate shoots from the lip and garners much media
attention for it. Fiorina's presence conveys a steady, well-informed
mind, the kind you might want making decisions as commander-in-chief.

"I
see a world in dire need of American leadership. I see President Obama
and Secretary Clinton always speaking in terms of ambivalence and shades
of gray, offering false choices and raising the shadow of doubt about
our will to lead.

"The next President of the United States must
reestablish our leadership—she must speak with clarity, accept that some
things are black and white and act with courage. She must be prepared
to challenge the status quo and change the way things are—whether in
Washington or around the world."

It's hard to argue with the New York Post's Michael Goodwin when he warns that "for many Democrats" the recommendation from two State Department inspectors general that the Justice Department launch a probe of waning presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton's ServerGate scandal "will serve as final proof she is — fatally flawed." Goodwin predicts that "her standing will further erode," and we can "look for Vice President Joe Biden to jump in Continue Reading »

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About the Columnist

A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Andrew Malcolm joined Investor's Business Daily October 2011. He formerly served on the L.A. Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four. UPDATE: In 2015, Politico reported Malcolm was ranked the No. 12 most influential political journalist on Twitter and No. 2 among conservatives.

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